A low-cost WLAN “Green” PIFA antenna on eco-friendly paper substrate

This work shows for the first time the practical application of paper as a substrate in real-life wireless local area network (WLAN) applications. Photographic paper is used here in the design, fabrication and testing of a printed inverted F-antenna (PIFA) operating at 2.45 GHz. Although paper substrates exhibit relatively high dielectric losses (tandelta ~ 0.07 at 2.45 GHz), the maximum gain achieved by the fabricated antenna is +1.2 dBi and its total simulated efficiency is approximately 82% at resonance. The simulation results of the return loss, as well as the radiation pattern of the antenna agree with the corresponding measured results that are presented in this work.